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Dear Sir,
I have just read Giovanni Battista Massidda's letter to the Editor, ‘Shall we ever know the whole truth about projective identification?’, in the latest issue of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (80: 365-7), and I have also read Riccardo Steiner's (80: 367-75) response with great interest. I too should like to contribute what I believe are relevant ideas from that Zeitgeist that may help further to illuminate the mystery of the origins of projective identification.
In an earlier work on the subject I referred to Tausk's description of the origins of the ‘influencing machine’ (Grotstein, 1981). I should like to cite that reference:
The projection of one's body may, then, be traced back to the developmental stage in which one's own body is the goal of the object finding. This must be the time when the infant is discovering his body, part by part, as the outer world, and is still groping for his hands and feet as though they were foreign objects … These disjecta membra are later on pieced together and systematized into a unified whole under the supervision of a psychic unity that receives all sensations of pleasure and pain from these separate parts. This process takes place by means of identification with one's own body … But if the psycho-analytic theories previously employed are correct, this object finding within one's organs, which can be regarding as parts of the outer world only by projection, must be preceded by a stage of identification with a narcissistic libido position, and it is necessary to assume two successive stages of identification and projection … I am, then, assuming the existence of these two successive phases of identification and projection in object finding and object choice within one's own body (1919, pp. 51-2; my italics).
I should now like to cite some of the works of Herman Nunberg, which also seem to be closely related to the concept of projective identification. In ‘On the catatonic attack’ Nunberg states:
The loss of the